Using Excel Macros to interact with Word or Access?

Hi - this is my first post here, and I am still a VB newbie, so sorry if this is really basic stuff. I have tried to search the last few days for a way to use visual basic in Excel macros to interact with Word docs and Access databases.

Basically, my program needs to do 3 things:
1. Pull data from an Access database into an Excel worksheet
2. Sort that data in Excel and allow the user to select some data
3. Export the selected data into a Word document and format it

Ideally, I would like to do all of this from the Excel worksheet, so I have been trying to write a macro that would work with Word and Access from Excel. Is this possible? What would be the syntax format for it?
My best guess would be to create an object for those ... I was able to create an object to open a new word doc from excel, but I couldn't get it to be formatted or type anything in it.